Presentation: Building the Halo 4 Services with Orleans

Halo 4 is a first-person shooter on the Xbox 360, with fast-paced, competitive gameplay. To complement the code on disc, a set of services were developed to store player statistics, display player presence information, deliver daily challenges, modify playlists, catch cheaters and more. As of June 2013 Halo 4 had 11.6 million players, who played 1.5 billion games, logging 270 million hours of gameplay.

Orleans, Distributed Virtual Actors for Programmability & Scalability, is an actor framework & runtime for building high scale distributed systems. It came from the eXtreme computing group in Microsoft Research, and is now Open Source on Github.

For Halo 4, 343 Industries built and deployed a new set of services built from the ground up to support high demand, low latency, and high availability using using Orleans and running in Window Azure. This talk will do an overview of Orleans, the challenges faced when building the Halo 4 services, and why the Actor Model and Orleans in particular were utilized to solve these problems.

Speaker: Caitie McCaffrey

Distributed Systems Engineer at Twitter

Caitie McCaffrey is a Backend Brat and Distributed Systems Diva at Twitter. Prior to that she spent the majority of her career building services and systems that power the entertainment industry at 343 Industries, Microsoft Game Studios, and HBO. Caitie has a degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and has worked on several video games including Gears of War 2, Gears of War 3, and Halo 4. She maintains a blog at CaitieM.com and frequently discusses technology and entertainment on Twitter @Caitie